Friday, 23 September 2016

Barring some kind of minor miracle - on a par perhaps with
CETI announcing first contact with the Vulcans or the Great British Bake Off returning to the BBC – Jeremy Corbyn will be
re-elected on Saturday as Leader of the Labour Party.

The announcement is due at around 11.45 am.

So after three decades or so of membership, my association
with the party will end at 11.46.

Yes, that’s all folks.

I’m afraid I really do mean it this time.

Party card in the shredder.
Standing order cancelled.

It’s goodnight from me. And it’s goodnight Vienna from
Labour.

I threatened to quit when the Jezster was first elected, but
people persuaded me to stay on in the hope that the situation could be
rescued. I wanted to go when Angela
Eagle was unceremoniously dumped in favour of Owen Smith, but was told I
couldn’t desert at such a critical moment and should rally behind the PLP’s
chosen challenger.

Stay and fight, my friends say. But over what?
The burnt-out shell of a 116-year-old party which has been brought to
ruin over a period of just 16 months?

Many MPs are tribally loyal to Labour and I respect that.
But the Labour to which they owe their loyalty has gone. The decision to elect Jeremy Corbyn for a
second time is so profoundly stupid and destructive that it shows the
membership has absolutely no desire to obtain power. The 1980s loony left haven’t just
taken over the proverbial asylum. They’ve locked up the orderlies and are
changing the menu in the refectory.

The people who support the veteran MP for Islington North
are either cynical ultra-leftists who have no interest in Labour’s
representation in Parliament or they are people sanctimoniously wedded to the
idea that permanent opposition is a price worth paying for a range of abstract
principles.

Much has been made of the poor campaigns of Yvette Cooper,
Andy Burnham and Liz Kendall last year. These mainstream politicians were
criticised for offering ‘more of the same’ or ‘Tory Lite’. The reality is that they provided intelligent
and nuanced responses to the challenges of the modern world. It was just that
the members – many of whom signed up specifically to vote for Corbyn while the
election process was under way – wanted simplistic slogans instead.

In that respect, Ed Balls was absolutely right to say this
week that there is a common thread between Corbyn and Trump and populist
movements of the far right. They all scream
about the ills of modern society with no coherent idea of how to address them.
They all believe that globalisation can somehow be wished away. And they have
no end of scapegoats for poor performance – the most notable being the much-derided
‘mainstream media’.

Here’s my prediction for what happens if, as expected, the
sainted JC is anointed once more.

There will be crowing and gloating and nastiness in the
Labour conference hall and in the dark corners of the web. Corbyn and his pal Mao-Donnell will no doubt
make conciliatory noises while their supporters run amok, targeting
‘treacherous’ Labour MPs who dared to question his leadership and will start working
towards their de-selection. They will approach the task with all the charm,
subtlety and grace that you’d expect of an outing of the Momentum Kids’ Club.
Make that the Momentum Kids’ Club fuelled by illicitly smuggled sugar-laden
biscuits, strictly prohibited by the Dear Leader.

So my message to Labour MPs is this: do not humiliate
yourselves. You represent the views of millions of voters who hope for the
return of a moderate progressive government.

Jeremy Corbyn represents supporters of Jeremy Corbyn and
claims a popular mantle in the same way the Pope can point to adoring crowds in
St Peter’s Square of a Sunday.

Don’t go back to his shadow cabinet with your tail between
your legs. That’s what he wants you to do and it consolidates his power.

Don’t tell the media that we can all get along again. That’s
what he wants you to say and it creates an illusion that he is somehow
credible. He’s not.

The time has come for a new centre-left party.

Of course, it will be small at first, but it will grow.

The argument that it will hand the Tories the next election
is neither here nor there. As things
stand, the Tories are pretty much guaranteed to win the next election anyway.

There’s no doubt that the formation of a new party flies in
the face of the first-past-the-post electoral system. But people don’t get
divorced because they imagine it’s a good idea in principle. They do it because
they can no longer live together. They do it because there is absolutely no alternativeoption.

Most importantly, the public deserves a real choice in the
next election. In a modern, healthy democracy there needs to be a voice of
moderation which sits somewhere between the ‘hard’ Brexiters and grammar school
pushers on the one hand, and the old-style left-wing headbangers on the
other.

I’m sad as I write this, because I devoted a great part of
my late teens, twenties and early thirties to the party. I served as the Labour
General Secretary of the London NUS in the late 80s. I chaired Frank Dobson’s
constituency Labour Party in the early to mid-90s. I went on to stand in two
parliamentary elections and have done more than my fair share of knocking on
doors, delivering leaflets and phoning potential voters.

I never thought I would one day feel so out of place in the
party that I would be forced to leave. But that day has come.

It would be dishonest to pretend that I could ever ask
people to vote for Corbyn and McDonnell.
I couldn’t bring myself to vote for them myself. In fact, for the first
time in my life, I may be unable to vote for any party in the next general election. That’s not just a tragedy for Labour. It’s a
terrible reflection on the state of British political life.

Wednesday, 14 September 2016

Those on the fringes of political life always need a
scapegoat when the electorate fails to embrace their utopian or dystopian
visions of how society should develop.

On the far right, these scapegoats tend to be Jews, the
liberal establishment and the press. On the far left, they tend to be Zionists,
the right-wing establishment and the press.

Seeing a pattern here?

Yes, there is an almost complete symmetry across the
spectrum.

It’s become even more marked now with obsession among social
media conspiracy merchants with the supposed lies and distortion of the
‘mainstream media’ or ‘MSM’.

Back in the 1980s, the loony left railed against the ‘Tory press’
– a choice of enemy that right-wingers found hard to embrace, for fairly
obvious reasons. But now the focus of
ire is shared and internationalised
with fellow fanatics on the ropey right. Trump supporters across the Atlantic
and Le Pen followers across the channel join Corbynistas in a fanatical dislike
of all regular newspapers, magazines,
radio stations and TV channels.

If we look, just for the moment, at Jez’s Facebook and
Twitter fanatics in the UK, it’s important to stress that their hitlist of
condemned media outlets goes way beyond the usual suspects. It’s not just the
Murdoch-owned Sun, or the right-wing Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph.

A brainy and feisty journalist, such as Laura
Kuenssberg? She should be sacked.

The left-leaning Mirror
and Guardian? Subsumed into the campaign of vitriol against
the Labour Leader who amassed the biggest ‘mandate’ in history.

In fact, anything written by a proper journalist, who is paid a salary by a media outlet with
corporate owners or advertisers, is condemned.

Any article or media interview critical of the Jezuits’ guru
– or perceived to undermine his position as Leader of the Labour Party – will immediately
be dismissed if it is published or broadcast via the MSM. The medium disqualifies the source and the
message from getting any kind of hearing.

The psychological and political thought process here – which
has all the trappings of a religion - goes something like this:

The MSM has an agenda, which is to undermine and destroy
Corbyn, because powerful vested interests are frightened of what he represents.

Ordinary people have been ‘brainwashed’ by the MSM to accept
a ‘neo-liberal’ ideology.

More and more people have ‘awakened’ from their
capitalist-induced slumber and are now challenging the power of the MSM.

They share information on their own networks and websites,
which are far more reliable because they aren’t tainted by the vested interests
of the MSM.

These are the kind of garbled ramblings of the darker edge
of the web, where people have for many years debated the influence of lizards
over political and economic life, while pausing very occasionally to consider
whether the Moon landings were faked.

But the ubiquity and pervasiveness of this crackpot
conspiracy culture forces us to address some of their points.

First of all, let’s get one thing straight. No vested interests
are frightened of Corbyn.

Why? Because he is
completely incompetent and has a popularity rating of somewhere between minus
30 and minus 40 in the polls. He is never going to be Prime Minister of the UK
or lead a government.

The vested interests would be far more frightened of a
competent Labour Leader who actually had a chance of achieving power.

What the media does is ask Corbyn difficult questions, which
he often can’t answer. And they poke fun at him, because the idea of a 1980s
socialist with a penchant for jam-making and relaxation on the allotment is
intrinsically funny. (Particularly when you couple it with the notion that he
has somehow blagged his way into becoming leader of a major political party.)

The whole ‘brainwashing’ argument is probably expressed more
elegantly in academic circles than by Corbynistas online. Noam Chomsky, for instance, bears a great deal
of responsibility for fuelling the whole MSM obsession and, of course, there is
a perfectly legitimate debate to be had over the way in which media helps to
construct social , cultural and political norms. It is doubtful, however, that
every person who uses the term ‘MSM’ online is intimately familiar with the
intellectual discourse that surrounds it.

To most Jez fans, the position is clear. The people – or, God help us, the sheeple –
have been fed a diet of poison by the media, which has affected their ability
to think rationally and embrace socialism. Even though a return to
nationalisation, the eradication of nuclear weapons and the launch of
women-only train carriages would clearly be in the proletariat’s best
interests, they stubbornly refuse to see it.

Strangely, the supporters of Corbyn are unaffected by the
magical rays beamed into people’s homes and on to their tablets and mobiles.
With their razor-sharp intellect and incisive socialist analysis, they have
erected a force field around themselves to protect themselves from such false
consciousness and have no truck with any of the ‘lamestream’ media messages.

So where do the Corbynistas get their impartial news from,
then? The BBC is banned. Fox is shot.
There’s a complete embargo on the MSM.
So what do they do? They go to cranky websites and dubious social media
sources, which have an agenda every bit as obvious as that of newspaper
proprietors. They share poorly-spelt and garishly-designed memes as if they
have been created as handy educational tools for an infant school. By the
pupils.

The Canary is a favourite of the Corbyn fans and, believe
me, it is strictly for the birds. Breathless would-be newshounds serve up a
stories which are purely designed to reinforce the existing viewpoints of the
Alt Left brigade. Their stock-in-trade is taking something fairly obvious –
far-left activists being suspended from Labour, for instance – and dressing it
up as if it’s some kind of revelation or scoop. (When their hacks explain internal
Labour politics, I often find reads as if it’s written for people who have only
got involved in the past year. By people who learnt about it themselves six
months earlier.)

But what’s this I see on The Canary?

It couldn’t be, could it? An advertisement?

For something that I might actually be interested in? A
targeted ad on the right-hand side on the page?

How long before The Canary itself is part of the MSM?

The Huffington Post started out as a blog, after all. Perez
Hilton used to be a one-man band, rather than a one-off brand.

If enough of us started to sift through the droppings from
the Canary cage, would that signal that it was now ‘mainstream’?

One of the profound weaknesses of the MSM argument is that
we now actually live in a world of millions of media sources. In the minds of
the Corbynistas, these may be sifted neatly into ‘mainstream’ and
alternative/underground. But the dividing line is not exactly neat and tidy.

And then it’s worth noting a splendid irony too.

Mainstream media seems just fine for the Corbynistas when
it’s the MSM of, say, Russia or Iran.
Jeremy Corbyn was happy to present tedious shows on a channel sponsored
by the regime in Tehran, while RT – widely viewed as a propaganda tool for the
Kremlin – is often referenced in social media debates. But RT (originally styled as Russia Today) is
a well-funded channel with foreign bureaux, satellite links, anchors in comfy
Moscow studios and plenty of advertising.

Isn’t it time for the Jezuits to be honest? Any media outlet
which asks difficult questions of the saintly Jez is dismissed as ‘mainstream’.
And any mainstream channel which gives him an easy ride is provided with some
kind of Papal dispensation.

Thursday, 1 September 2016

So it’s all over, bar the enthusiastic shouting of Corbyn
supporters towards the end of September.

We can wait for the fat lady to sing, but let’s not kid
ourselves that her tune is going to sound anything other than the death of the
Labour Party.

The latest YouGov polling gives Corbyn a massive lead over
his challenger Owen Smith. And YouGov has a pretty good track record in
internal party elections. The figures may be arguable, but I fear the result
isn’t.

When you read the small print of the survey, there are some
truly astonishing things to take on board. Smith, for instance, is ahead by a large
margin among long-standing members. But Corbyn is the choice of the people
who’ve flooded in since September 2015, specifically to support him.

This is political contest as game show.

The red team tries to sign up more people than the pink
team. And the pink team tries to confuse existing red team members by
pretending that pink is really red. As a result, some contestants may run over
to the wrong side of the political assault course.

Both the teams have a joker to play. Unfortunately, in each
case, it happens to be their respective candidate.

Of course, it’s relatively easy for Corbynistas to round up
the flotsam and jetsam of the British left with a rallying cry of ‘vote for
Jez’. Rather less easy for sensible types to persuade their friends to sign up
for Smith. After all, who wants to buy a ticket to board the Titanic when the
iceberg has been sighted and you’ve already done some back-of-an-envelope
calculations on the life-boat situation?

There’s another snippet from the YouGov poll worth
reflecting on. A substantial minority of people voting for Corbyn admit that he
is not competent.

Whoa!

Hold your horses just a second. Let’s spell that out in S L
O W motion.

Around 40% of the people who say they’re voting for Jezza know him to be incompetent, but are voting for him anyway.

This is beyond crazy.

Support for the man is tribal, irrational and doing
irreparable damage, not only to the Labour Party but also to the overall health
of British democracy. And, no, I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. Let’s face
it. If there is no effective opposition
in a two-party system, you are left with a one-party system.

The more the madness continues, the more parallels I see
with the Trump phenomenon in the United States.
Many supporters of the US presidential hopeful – when confronted by
their candidate’s gaffes, extremist opinions and lack of grasp of reality –
simply shrug their shoulders. They’re
goingto vote for the guy anyway.

Why?

Because he’s Trump.

And for Trump, read Jez. While as personalities and
politicians, they may well be poles apart, their supporters adhere to the same
essential principles:

Don’t trust the media. They’re out to get us.

Don’t worry that the political establishment is against us.
They would be.

Don’t worry that we have no coherent programme. We know what
we’re against and that’s all that
matters.

Don’t let them attack our man. He is a visionary and we are
going to vote for him anyway.

Jez and Trump are insurgents who prosper from the alienation
and anomie created by globalisation. Bizarrely, they have much more in common
than you could ever imagine, including an irrational loyalist fan base, very
thick skins and a complete lack of concern for what people think of them. Not
to mention a love of merchandise.

But Jez is the poor relation.

He is dime-store Trump without the charisma, without the
money, without the popular support.

Where are we headed? It’s difficult at the moment to tell.
British and American politics are fracturing left and right in unpredictable
and dangerous ways.

Ed Balls and Liz Kendall – representatives of the Brownite
and Blairite wings of New Labour respectively – have both said that moderates
must stay and fight after a second Corbyn victory. But their voices will be
swamped, Jez’s position entrenched and then reprisals will quickly ensue.

The only answer will be creation of a new, credible
centre-left party. More on that soon.